[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

I don't really see how troop quality doesn't work here? A troop of halfling Heavy Infantry would just be one or two levels of quality lower than their training and gear would otherwise suggest.

I'm also confused about the reference to "undoing my math to see if the halfling phalanx has maxed out its bonus". What do you mean here?

These two are connected. I raise a unit of halfling heavy infantry. These are the biggest, bravest halflings I can get from the village, so they are raised as "Good Quality Halfling Heavy Infantry". Which means they are Average Heavy infantry. Marked as halflings. If I raise them a level, they become either Elite halfling heavy infantry or good heavy infantry. Which has a difference in cost. And I can never raise this unit past "Good" to "Elite". Every-time I work with troop quality I have to make sure that the "Halfling" Troop quality modifier is in the right place, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to mess that up sometime.

Another concern is that using this scheme I can't raise the lowest level of halfling infantry at all. I have to make something up for when you pull a bunch of halfling peasant levies together. Is that a good place to get heavy infantry? No, but sometimes you need pikes, which are similar, so enemy calvary doesn't make a mess out of you.

An across-the-board penalty or bonus doesn't make much sense either, I think - a bunch of halflings won't make good Heavy Infantry, but they'll probably be great Light Infantry - the ability to sneak about and fire more accurately would more than compensate for low base damage, I would think.

That's true... note that I said that

I'm thinking of applying it twice as hard to some element types as others: primarily those meant to be in the heat of battle, rather than skirmishers.

Now that I look at it though, the numbers given are the heat of battle numbers, not the basic ones. I may just ignore units that don't do a lot of shoving in battle. So Halflings can be bowmen, skirmishers, and so forth without penalty, but have problems when trying to win a stand-up fight.

I'd still like to give some effect to reflect smaller overall weapons, and I love the idea of ogre bowmen showering massive arrows, but I suppose giving the smaller races an edge on their kinds of fighting does make sense.

If you want to give Super-Soldier more granularity, why not just do that? If you think ogres' great size and strength really equate to being better as all types of troops, but not twice as much better, just create an intermediate step, "Impressive Solder" or something like that, that gives +50% to TS (or whatever you think is appropriate), with a similar increase to Raise and Maintain.

Mostly because I can take care of the small races at the same time. Though the above does have merit.